Warmoth Strat

I think it’s part of the journey of the player to have a crack at a home build at some point. Aftermarket parts have never been more plentiful and it’s possible to build a very nice guitar without too much stress or, indeed, effort.

Which is nice.

With this in mind I set about building a strat based guitar in early 2007. I picked up a decent no-name ash body off ebay and placed an order with Warmoth for a quartersawn maple neck with a reverse 50’s headstock. An ebony board with no dots and 6105 tall and narrow frets completed the specification and it arrived in good time from the USA. I sourced some Gotoh tuners to do the needful. The guitar was built with a particular band project in mind, so I kept it simple. You can’t go wrong with a JB pickup, so that’s what went in with just a volume and tone control. I plundered a Kahler Flyer bridge from a old Aria Pro II and put it all together.

It turned out surprisingly well. A minor bit of fretwork was needed to really turn it into a player and have gigged it plenty of times over the last few years. It has been strung heavily and tuned low for that period, usually own to B or even dropped A. It’s a solid, reliable workhorse type and I can’t recall having ever to adjust the truss rod since the initial setup, so I doff my cap in the direction of the good people of Warmoth.

The body has H-S-H routing so, at some point, I may stick a trio of single coils in there just to see what kind of real strat it would be but, for the time being, I keep it as my primary downtuned player, a role it performs admirably.